After 244 Years, the End For the Dead Tree Encyclopedia Britannica 373
Rick Zeman writes "According to the New York Times, it's the end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica, saying, '...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds.' The last print edition will be the 32-volume 2010 edition."
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:4, Interesting)
...flicking through copies of encyclopedias that are more than 20 years old, seeing a snapshot of our knowledge at the time
This [archive.org] should help your nostalgia in the future.
best investment (Score:5, Interesting)
Great Books of the Western World Series (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Citable (Score:3, Interesting)
>This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia --
This is mainly due to the fact that the vast majority of those in academia (=higher education) consider Wikipedia to be absolutely unreliable. And the foregoing is usually with good reason. Most Wikipedia articles on anything from Mexico to traffic lights, are a sophomoric collection of random facts without any overall coherence or structure-- the latter being the exact thing, that higher knowledge attempts to impart.
Add to that rampant inaccurracies, which are often hidden and hard to root out, and you *might* understand why academics think Wikipedia is low value.
The bottom line is that Wikipedia isn't written by experts, or for the large part by people who have expertise in *any* field, and for topics outside CS and parts of the sciences, it's pretty poor because non-expert "crowds" don't have much judgment. In short-- there's no wisdom in crowds, only amplified ignorance.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Interesting)
I own one set and it's not nearly as cool as it sounds. Unless I'm doing serious research work on some even/someone (which I haven't done since I enrolled in college), you're not using it. And even those have been replaced by Encarta and things like that.
There are way better mediums than paper and some are actually done by the so called experts. They spelled their own death by not adapting to the times and wanting the times to adapt to them. Now they have an on-line presence and CD/DVD's, but they are years too late.
Re:Losing A Snapshot Of History (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a big snag. Wikipedia refuses completely to allow anything that has a second source. You can not make an update if you know the truth and you're an expert in the field, because that's not a second source. Wikipedia doesn't care about getting the truth, they care about keeping their editors happy and chummy with no unruly outsiders in the club. The wisdom of crowds means reject anything that's not conventional wisdom.
So Encyclopedia Britannica is a perfect second source. Without it the wisdom of the crowds is left alone to try and be honest except that crowds don't do that naturally. The whole myth of wisdom of the crowds could fall apart. We NEED an encyclopedia that's run sanely. Wikipedia is nice and all when you want to look up an overview of a subject but it is NOT remotely an authoritative source.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:5, Interesting)
My mum used to sell them back in the 90's. I remember that they came out with a CD-ROM version at some point in that timeframe. I do seem to recall though that it was badly implemented, but they were not 'too late'. They just mucked up the implementation.
Gonna be picking up my an old second hand set soon. Not as a serious reference but if there is one thing my mother instilled into me, it was an appreciation of books. A nicely bound set of EB is a nice thing to have on a bookshelf if you have the space. I reckon this set i'll be getitng is just the basic binding though...
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:4, Interesting)
C'mon everyone, it's Britannica, let's spell it Encyclopaedia
Re:Yeah... (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1958, this was probably one of the best summaries of human knowledge available.
Re:Citable (Score:5, Interesting)
You should never cite an encyclopedia in a paper, period, unless you're writing a paper about encyclopedias.
I understand that's the "rule", but I think it's a stupid one. The reason for the rule is legitimate: you ough to rely mainly on primary sources. You don't want to cite the encyclopedia entry on Adam Smith; you want to cite Wealth of Nations directly. That's fine, but if mindlessly enforced (as it is), it means many facts that are useful but not necessarily central to your point aren't given sources at all; they're treated as "common knowledge".
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy, and you cite the landmark 1973 HEW report "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". But if you look at the report itself it's clear that the report while delivered in July 1973, was started in the Spring of 1972. This means it was developed as the Watergate Scandal was unfolding. That particular tidbit explains a great deal that is curious about this report, for the report lays out a strong case for privacy restraints on private aggregators of commercial data, but then actually recommends *against* such restraints in the conclusion. On January 30, 1973 HEW Secretary Eliot Richardson shifted to Defense, after most of the report had been compiled. The conclusions were written under the his more conservative replacement, Caspar Weinberger.
Now you have three choice for dealing with a fact like that. You can just allude to it without citations. You can cite an encyclopedia entry on Eliot Richardson. Or you can try to dig up original references in US government documents. Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
I think the *rational* standard would be to have a source for *every* fact, but allow any reputable reference work as a source for auxiliary facts where there is no question on interpretation of paraphrasing. The "no encyclopedia" rule bans encyclopedias but allows similar kinds of references to be used, even though those references are not primary sources either. I could cite the CRC handbook on, say, the atomic weight of iron, but it's not a primary source. That'd be the papers in chemical or physics journals used by the CRC editors.
Wikipedia and Britannica on Each Other (Score:5, Interesting)
60 paragraphs on Britannica's history, status, organization, awards, etc. 15 paragraphs on criticisms, bias, racism/sexism. Cites over 100 sources.
Britannica's Article on Wikipedia [britannica.com]
2 paragraphs on Origin and Growth (one of which is devoted to suggesting that Wikipedia is running out of steam or somehow failing in its mission), 4 paragraphs on "Issues and controversies," including a suggestion that Wikipedia was a haven for child pornography. Everything about the article says, "parents, keep your children away from this new-fangled, dangerous, unreliable Wikipedia thing!" Cites no sources. What is really amusing is that Britannica's stated slogan (at the top of every page) is "facts matter." I guess attribution does not. Their home page features an image of a 1st-gen iPad with the caption "looking ahead." If Britannica considers 2010 to be the future, that explains a lot.
Re:George Orwell would approve (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1953, when Stalin died, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was in the middle of being published. In the reshuffle the chief of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, was declared a spy, but his article was in the B volume which was already published. As a result, an update was sent to all libraries in the form of a page be glued on top of his article, and the encyclopedia has an unexpectedly long article on the Bering Sea.
Re:The ultimate hipster edition (Score:4, Interesting)
Or the self sufficiency handbook. Tells you everything from brewing and carpentry to how to grown your own food and slaughter your own animals.
I grew up with a set of these... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to spend hours randomly browsing through the articles. At some point, over many moves, they were given away. Now, I find I do the same thing, but on Wikipedia.
It used to be that when you visited someone's home for the first time, you could learn a bit about them by seeing what books they had on their shelves... which ones were worn, how chaotic or organized the books were, how many they had, what they were about, how many were lying around in mid-read... and if there was a set of encyclopedias somewhere. And, of course, if there was not a single book in the house, there was something suspect about them.
I suspect that in a decade or two, what I'll learn from seeing books in someone's house is that they are old. I'm sure I'll be included in that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)